The Dreamers

by Karen Thompson Walker

People love a tragedy when it’s happening far away:

they’ve been sleeping different sleep: short and sudden, and like sipping salt water for thirst—they wake more in need than before they closed their eyes.

This is how the sickness travels best: through all the same channels as do fondness and friendship and love.

But all Sara can feel at this moment is a vague sense of an animal indifference in the universe, how everything in nature is just as relentless as a virus, replicating itself again and again without end.

There is a difference between what is not true and what cannot be measured.

How quickly human spaces, unattended, come to rot.

But forget all that. The only way to tell some stories is with the oldest, most familiar words: this here, this is the breaking of a heart.

But time moves in only the one direction. Not everything that breaks can be repaired.

His girl will love and be loved. She will suffer, and she will cause suffering. She will be known and unknown. She will be content and discontented. She will sometimes be lonely and sometimes less so. She will dream and be dreamed of. She will grieve and be grieved for. She will struggle and triumph and fail. There will be days of spectacular beauty, sublime and unearned. There will be moments of rapture. She will sometimes feel afraid. The sun will warm her face. The earth will ground her body.